A television show which reunites lost heirs with their family fortunes has featured a Purley man and his £400,000 estate.

Heir Hunters uses financial detectives to look through reams of birth, death and marriage certificates to find the rightful heirs to wealthy estates.

On June 30, the show will focus on the life of Douglas Barber, who died in 2008, aged just 58.

The bachelor, born in Woolwich, died leaving no discernible family to inherit his fortune.

Fraser and Fraser was brought in to solve the mystery.

The company has been operating as a genealogists and international probate researcher for more than 30 years.

They took on the mission of reuniting Mr Barber’s family with a fortune he had amassed.

With only limited information about both the mother and father of Mr Barber they began the task of searching their records database to try and track down his immediate surviving family members.

Mr Barber was born in 1949, and was the illegitimate son of Lily Lacey Barber and a John Henry Barber.

He lived in Purley in rented accommodation with his landlady, an elderly lady called Doris Searle.

Mrs Searle, it transpired, was the original owner of the fortune thought to be that of Douglas Barber.

She died when she was over 100 years old and left everything to her live-in tenant and friend.

Fraser and Fraser’s task was to locate the heirs – and that they did, all 32 of them.

According to the records pulled by detectives at the company, Douglas’ father, John Henry Barber, remarried but had no living relatives.

His mother, on the other hand, had a sister who through remarriage left Mr Barber with 32 cousins, most of whom live in Wales.

The programme airs on Tuesday, June 30, at 9.15am.

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